A duel at sunrise
Seriously. Cristina Odone must feel very sure that Richard Dawkins won’t sue her for libel, or she wouldn’t say “Richard Dawkins is responsible for peddling a lot of lies about faith” in her blog at The Telegraph, and the Telegraph wouldn’t let her, either. She wouldn’t just casually risk a money-devouring and time-devouring lawsuit just for the hell of it, or for the tiny fun of accusing Dawkins of peddling lies in a Telegraph blog. She writes for the national press in the UK, so she can’t possibly be unaware of the UK’s insane libel laws and how they are used. She can’t possibly be unaware of Simon Singh and the BCA and the word “bogus” – so it’s surely fair to say that she simply would not use that word if she were not very confident that she and her paper would not be sued when she did. That’s fair isn’t it? I’m not being uncharitable? She can’t have thought “Risky word – libel – lawsuits – Singh – two years – hundreds of thousands – better not – oh what the hell, I’ll risk it, because it’s worth it.” Can she?
No. So she must have felt safe. How could she have felt safe other than because she knows Dawkins was part of the campaign against the libel laws and for Singh’s right to say what he said? Or perhaps because she knows more generally what his principles are. At any rate she clearly did feel safe, and feeling safe, she went right ahead and accused him of lying.
She’s not a good person. She is apparently a “good Catholic,” in the sense that she is blindly loyal to the Catholic church and will stoop to almost anything to defend it – but she is not a good person. She takes advantage of other people’s principles in order to defame them.
In short, Odone is [edit]
But I have no reason to think she is too principled to sue me, so I’ll have to edit that comment.
She seems to be the female Catholic version of George Pitcher. Shudder!
Let’s just say she takes a catholic attitude to the truth.
Interesting. A programme on paedophile priests show “that anti-Catholic bias in broadcasting is alive and well.”
I thought we were being facetious when we said that childrape and Catholicism were compatible like faith and science.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Andy Lewis, Danny Strickland and Tim Wookie, Thetis. Thetis said: Ophelia Benson:Odone's a good Catholic but not a good person RT @lecanardnoir More christian values from Cristina Odone http://bit.ly/amPYYE […]
Miranda, quite, and Pitcher is another who relies on his confidence that particular people won’t sue him in order to slander them. If Evan Harris were litigious George Pitcher would be a very unhappy man right now – except he wouldn’t, because if Harris were litigious, Pitcher wouldn’t have written the foul things about Harris that he did.
Speaking of litigiousness, the Telegraph’s owners are known for that. (The Barclay brothers.) A light went on for me when I remembered something I read months ago about them: apparently they are very friendly with Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor.
I tend to think Dawkins might have a case against Odone under normal libel laws, never mind English ones.
Eventually Dawkins needs to take this to court. She would be liable under South African law – never mind English, and an important issue here is that libel laws aren’t always wrong.
Religious reporters have basically taken Dawkins and the atheist community’s unwillingness to sue to be a license to lie. In the process they are destroying journalism, taking what we sell – our integrity – and killing it.
Hmm. There’s something to that. The relentless lies do have a lot of traction.
Libel laws aren’t always wrong, but easy resort to them does (of course) have a repressive effect on free speech, so reluctance to use them becomes ingrained in people of liberal principles. That means the BCA lacks liberal principles, of course, but I don’t mind accepting that implication. My guess is that Richard would be very very reluctant to use them – not least because Odone’s words appear in an opinion piece, not a reportorial piece.